Comments on: Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Streethttp://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html
Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and powerSun, 02 Aug 2015 22:25:31 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2By: eveporcupinehttp://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html#comment-1017436
Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:46:54 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-1017436I was at OWS in NY and I am a 45 year old procedures analyst who just thinks our country should have a more just tax structure and worker protections. I was accompanied by a 40-year-old special ed teacher from Darien, CT. I guess I’m a terrorist. I guess I will admit to being terror-inducing if you are easily scared. BTW, saw some middle-aged cheese-hat wearing terrorists from WI while I was there.

We’re going to get hit by REAL terrorists while we have our collective head up our butt in the United States.
I guess that’s Ok, then the banks can ask for emergency bail out funding after the ensuing stock market collapse.

My point was that both sides of the right-to-bear issue present one-sided, name-calling “arguments” which are selective and self-serving.

Thanks for giving me a perfect example; yeah, I’m just “one of those guys.” Sheesh.

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 20:45:26 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-994252Further on John Michael Greer, what he seems to think is that “activists [with a “fetish for consensus politics”] hijacked the mass demonstrations in New York and elsewhere, pushed consensus methods on them, used those methods to get control of the meetings and the money, and then ran them into the ground.”

The story JMG is telling about Occupy is a fairy tale. In the real world, the notion of utilizing consensus methods is implicit right from the get-go, in the initial call from Adbusters (July 13, 2011) to occupy Wall Street and utilize tactics derived from “a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain.”

And then what happened? Well, on David Graeber’s account, a meeting was called at Bowling Green on August 2 “to plan some kind of action on Wall Street in mid-September,” and the outcome was a General Assembly where ultimately:

“We created a decision-making process (we would operate by modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups… Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. The core of the emerging group, which began to meet regularly in Tompkins Square park, were very young people who had cut their activist teeth on the Bloombergville encampment outside City Hall earlier in the summer; aside from that there was a smattering of activists who had been connected to the Global Justice movement with skills to share (one or two of whom I had to drag out of effective retirement), and, as mentioned a number of New Yorkers originally from Greece, Spain, even Tunisia, with knowledge and connections with those who were, or had been, involved in occupations there. We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a public space to create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as ‘democracy’ by the US government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone.”

JMG fails to realize that the movement was consensus-based from the very start. He mistakes the shift from the earlier consensus model to the Spokes model for an imposition of a consensus model on a movement that wasn’t previously using it. And he generalizes from the NYC-GA to the movement as a whole. For one thing, the issue of money and control of it is central to the story he is telling, and I doubt any other Occupy got anything like amount of money that poured into NY. For another, many GA’s never followed NYC-GA’s adoption of the Spokes model. (I suspect the majority did not, though I don’t have a real sense of how many did and how many didn’t.)

Greer’s view “that we have proven methods of running meeting[s] democratically,” that we should “go with what works,” is certainly one that is worthy of consideration. But he’s expressing this view in the context of a grossly uniformed and pretty much make-believe history of the Occupy movement. It’s also rather disturbing to see how dismissive he is about the point that the movement “was brutally suppressed by the State”:

“Brian, ‘brutally suppressed’? The kind of treatment that caused Occupy to crumple didn’t faze the protesters in Tahrir Square, to name only one example.”

In the early days of the Occupy movement, numerous advocates of consensus methods argued strenuously that leaderlessness meant that they wouldn’t know who to co-opt or kill. Anyone who was more than casually engaged, and had eyes to see, knows that a lot of effort and money went into the attempt to do to Occupy what the Republicans did to much (though not all of) the Tea Party movement. And we now know that the latter concern was an already-present reality, rather than a down-the-road hypothetical.

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:16:19 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-993827@Stan Musicial – you guys won’t lift a finger to fight the government. If so, you would have done it by now. The nation decends into tyranny and you guys are just polishing your guns.

I’m willing to bet the solidiers and marines WILL fire on American citizens, because after all we’ve seen it at Kent State. The government has the power to manufacture some terrifying propaganda, which still works will a large majority of the idiot populace.

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:09:20 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-993821As in the discussion re gun control, those in favor of disarming US citizens ridicule the notion that a few million armed Americans could stand up to the might of the US military. It would be asymetric warfare, to be sure, but 28,000 +/- “insurgents” in Iraq, and fewer fighters than that in Afghanistan, have been doing a pretty good job.

Add to that the probable hesitation of even well-trained soldiers to fire on fellow Americans, and it’s not so unlikely after all.

Whereas, it’s a given that a completely unarmed populace has no power beyond voting (i.e. protest, dissent) to influence its government, and is at the mercy of said government; for what defines governments better than that they have monopolized the use of violence?

With this in mind, the ridicule directed at gun owners from professed (and often proud) gun-ignoramuses is indeed amusing.

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 04:10:35 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-993078I’d like to know what decision-making process the Montreal students used in the Erable Printemps, and whether that was a GA or like what the Mexican students used.

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 03:21:40 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-993024John Michael Greer has no idea what he’s talking about when he writes about Occupy. He’s not acquainted with the basic facts, and doesn’t know it. The Archdruid’s Report is one of my regular reads, but his uninformed response to Occupy is intellectually sloppy, to put it charitably.
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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 03:20:02 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-993022The FBI are a bunch of absolute wasters.

The banks are a threat to the state, but the FBI spend their days going after hippies’ whose only tactic is to sit uselessly in the street and _ask_ criminal mob bosses in the banks to stop being criminal.

I honestly don’t know which is the more worthless organisation; OWS or the FBI. (At least the public doens’t have to pay for OWS)

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Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:06:44 +0000http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?p=36976#comment-992814This was the guy put up in the last quiet coup by the garbage crew headquarted in London…http://youtu.be/vezr3dW4J5s
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